Molecula Secures $17.6 Million in Series A Funding to Democratize Machine-Scale Analytics and AI

Company launches first cloud-based offering as “easy button” for AI; Its enterprise feature store sets standard for big data readiness and query speed

AUSTIN, Jan. 13, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Molecula, an enterprise feature store built for machine-scale analytics and AI, today announced it closed a $17.6 million Series A round of funding, bringing its total funding to $23.6 million. The round is led by Drive Capital, with participation from TTV Capital and existing investors including Tensility. Andy Jenks of Drive Capital will join Molecula’s board of directors. Proceeds from this round will accelerate the launch of Molecula Cloud and scale the organization’s sales and marketing efforts.

“A machine learning revolution is taking place right now — businesses, no matter the industry, will need to implement ML and AI to remain competitive, but current infrastructures are far too complex,” said Higinio (“H.O.”) Maycotte, CEO of Molecula. “The feature store is emerging as the most transformative category in the data space because it automates the preparation of data for machine-scale analytics and AI. Molecula takes the feature store one step further, by bridging the entire spectrum from data readiness to MLOps, making your most important data instantly computable.”

Today, businesses are drowning in the massive volumes of data generated every second and are hindered by hundreds of disparate data sources. Legacy and current generation technologies require federating, pre-aggregating, copying, and moving data, making real-time decisions almost impossible.

“The majority of the migration to the cloud, from a data infrastructure perspective, is simply lifting and shifting legacy approaches. Molecula’s feature store breaks this mold by creating a new compute layer for data,” said Andy Jenks, Partner, Drive Capital. “The market for data readiness is as big as it gets and we are excited to partner with Molecula to open the doors for AI and advanced analytics in every company, regardless of the environment.”

Molecula, the commercial version of the open-source, feature-first data format Pilosa, offers data engineers and data scientists a simple cloud-agnostic, compute-ready data layer that is ready for high performance, high-concurrency, advanced analytics, and AI. The system continuously extracts and updates features into a centralized feature store. This reduces the data footprint by 60-90 percent and provides a secure data format for sharing. By partnering with Molecula, industries including life sciences, healthcare, and financial services can achieve tangible value from their data easily, quickly, and with fewer resources.

An early customer of Molecula’s cloud solution includes a multiplayer online gaming network, Subspace, where speed and ultra-low latency are mission-critical to its performance.

“Molecula provides the millisecond, real-time data access and query speeds we need to help us optimize internet traffic and bottlenecks for online gamers around the globe,” said Don Brown, Head of Data at Subspace. “With the cloud offering, Molecula is delivering a completely turnkey environment so that we can focus on running our business and getting maximum value from our data.”

To learn more about Molecula and how businesses can strategically use data, contact us, or join one of our upcoming webinars.

About Molecula
Molecula is an enterprise feature store that simplifies, accelerates, and controls big data access to power machine-scale analytics and AI. The platform continuously extracts features, reduces the dimensionality of data at the source, and routes real-time feature changes into a central store, enabling millisecond queries, computation, and feature re-use across formats and locations without copying or moving raw data. The Molecula feature store provides data engineers, data scientists, and application developers a single access point to graduate from reporting and explaining with human-scale data to predicting and prescribing real-time business outcomes on all data. As an overlay to conventional systems, feature stores are easily adaptable, outperform traditional data-oriented approaches, and significantly reduce complexity, costs, and risk. Molecula is the enterprise version of Pilosa, an open-source feature-first storage format with 2,100+ global users. Molecula was founded in 2019 and has offices in Austin, TX and Palo Alto, CA, with a mission to establish its feature store as the new standard for big data access.

About Drive Capital
Drive Capital is a Columbus-based venture capital firm focused on investing in the world’s next generation of market-defining companies. The firm started in 2013 and raised over $1B of funds to invest in startups solving problems in large markets. Drive is an investor in more than 40 companies outside of Silicon Valley, including Root Insurance, Duolingo, and Branch.

Media Contact:
Molecula, Jocelyn Johnson, Jocelyn.Johnson@molecula.com